This relates generally to electronic devices, and more particularly, to electronic devices with displays.
Electronic devices often include displays. For example, cellular telephones and portable computers often include organic light-emitting diode displays for presenting visual information to a user.
To ensure that organic light-emitting diode displays do not consume too much power, electronic devices often use a peak luminance control algorithm (sometimes referred to as automatic current limiting). When this functionality is enabled, the peak luminance of displayed images is limited whenever the content being displayed exhibits large values of average luminance. When the average luminance of a frame of image data is low, the display is allowed to display content with a large peak luminance. In this situation, a display with sparse content such as a few icons on a black background can display the content brightly.
When the average luminance of a frame of image data is high, there is a potential for excessive current draw by the display if all of the content in the frame is displayed at maximum luminance. When the peak luminance control algorithm is used, the peak luminance of the content is reduced automatically by the display. This ensures that the amount of current and therefore the amount of power that is drawn by the display will be capped. In addition to limiting power consumption, this may help limit temperature rise in the display and thereby extend the lifetime of display pixels in the display.
Even when using peak luminance control, however, challenges remain. Further reductions in power consumption and extensions to the lifetimes of the display pixels in the display would be desirable.